Winter ’18 – What to expect!!!

Hurray!!! The long wait is over now for many of the features which we expected and improvements needed. Winter’18 now bring in a top notch cool features to LEX experience in Salesforce. A lot of UI changes and a lot of new features.

The big pain and frustration of seeing a lot of white spaces. We know how it feels as an end user and also as an advisor of Lightning Experience to our customers, we felt sad to see a lot of white spaces on every lightning page. And so we asked for it to be densified in the UI and handling the white gaps effectively.

Now Salesforce has slapped us with their improved LEX UI. Did you notice the backgroundtheme? Did you notice the components being laid closer giving us a rich look on the page? And more important – “Did you notice the page load time has got faster than ever?” 🙂 What else could we expect from a Salesforce Release!!!

I’m so eager to keep exploring all the features in Winter’18. So Let’s get to the crux of the list which I personally liked in this Winter’18.

Key improvements to be expected in Winter’18 Lightning Experience:

Lightning Themes and Branding: [This is my personal favorite 🙂 ]

Theme & Branding

Improved information density, legibility, contrast, and even added a splash of color. That means less time scrolling and scanning and more time focused on what matters most.This change applies to Lightning Experience only.

More information density and less white space, so you can see more of what you need without scrolling.

Better contrast between foreground and background, making it easier to scan and scroll while staying focused on what you need. We even added color and a background image inspired by our own Trailhead.

You don’t need to do anything to start enjoying these enhancements. If you like, though, you can change the background image and blue color to a neutral gray. In Setup, enter Themes and Branding in the Quick Find box, then select Themes and Branding, and select Hide.

New Lightning Footer with Animation:

Now Lightning Experience has cool animations for its footer widgets/components in the service console. One such example is what you see in the above animation for the omni-channel widget.

Developers, Build Your Community Your Way:

The Build Your Own template provides the basic pages every community needs: Home, Create Record, Error, Record Detail, Record List, Related Record List, Search, Check Password, Forgot Password, Login, Login Error, and Register. And you can easily add more pages and components for the experience you’re building. Customize your branding and themes to refine the look of your community.

Lightning Dialer: Voicemail Greeting and Company Number:

Add personal flair to voicemail. Sales reps can record custom greetings on their Lightning Dialer voicemail.

Sales reps can now record custom voice mail greetings and display a standard company number when making outgoing calls. These changes apply to Lightning Experience only.

Enhanced Instant Search Results:

Find the right record even before reaching the search results page. Spell correction has arrived in instant results. And if you know the account associated with the contact or opportunity, instant results provide more relevant suggestions. This change applies to Lightning Experience only.

Take a Guilt-Free Vacation with Out of Office (Generally Available):

Taking a vacation or other leave? Want everyone to know when they should leave you alone? The newly enhanced Out of Office feature is for you. You can set the dates you’re away and add a custom message. Your message and dates display prominently next to your name in Chatter, not just on your profile but almost anywhere that your name appears. This change applies to Lightning Experience only.

By default, the Out of Office message is “Out of Office” along with the start and end dates that you select. You can change it to something more fun, such as “At the Beach” or “Playing with Dolphins.”

You can also control whether Out of Office functionality is available to your users. Set it up in the new Out of Office section in Setup| Chatter Settings. This org preference is enabled by default.

Dynamic Branding: One Community, with a Different Look for Each Audience:

With branding sets, you can change the appearance and style of your community pages based on the audience viewing the page. No need to create individual communities for each customer or business need. Now you build your community once, and simply style it differently for each audience.

Branding sets take advantage of criteria-based audiences in the same way as page variations. Just as you can create several page variations and target them at different audiences, you can create different sets of branding properties to produce a unique look and feel for specific audiences.

Embed Dashboards on the Home Tab and in Lightning Apps:

Embed fully functional and interactive dashboards on the home tab to give your sales team the information they need when they log in to Salesforce. You can apply filters, refresh them and drill into filtered reports.

Emojis available in Chatter:

I don’t have to explain this. LOL! Do I ??? 😛 😛

Turn On Multiple Currencies Without Contacting Support:

It’s now possible to enable multiple currencies instantaneously without contacting Salesforce Customer Support or locking your org. These changes apply to Lightning Experience, Salesforce Classic, and all versions of the Salesforce1 mobile app.

To enable this feature, from Setup enter Company Information in the Quick Find box. Then select CompanyInformation and click Edit. Enable Activate Multiple Currencies, and save your changes.